Babylonian Map of the World


The Babylonian Map of the World is a Babylonian clay tablet
containing a labeled depiction of the known world, with a short and partially lost description, dated to roughly the 6th century BC.
The map is centered on the Euphrates, flowing from the north to the south.
The city of Babylon is shown on the Euphrates, in the northern half of the map. The mouth of the Euphrates is labelled "swamp" and "outflow". Susa, the capital of Elam, is shown to the south, Urartu to the northeast, and Habban, the capital of the Kassites is shown to the northwest. Mesopotamia is surrounded by a circular "bitter river" or Ocean, and eight "regions", depicted as triangular sections, are shown as lying beyond the Ocean.
It has been suggested that the depiction of these "regions" as triangles might indicate that they were imagined as mountains.
The tablet was discovered at Sippar, Baghdad Vilayet, some 60 km north of Babylon on the east bank of the Euphrates River. The text was first translated in 1889. The clay tablet resides at the British Museum.

Description of the mapped areas

The map is circular with two outer defined circles. Cuneiform script labels all locations inside the circular map, as well as a few regions outside. The two outer circles represent water in between and is labelled as idmaratum "bitter river", the salt sea.
Babylon north of center of the map; parallel lines at the bottom seem to represent the southern marshes, and a curved line coming from the north, northeast appear to represent the Zagros Mountains.
There are seven small interior circles at the perimeter areas within the circle, and they appear to represent seven cities.
Eight triangular sections on the external circle represent named "regions".
The description of five of them has survived.
1. "Mountain"
2. "City"
3. Urartu
4. Assyria
5. Der
6. ?
7. Swamp
8. Susa
9. Canal/"outflow"
10. Bit Yakin 		11. "City"
12. Habban
13. Babylon, divided by Euphrates
14 - 17. Ocean
18 - 22. outer "regions"
23 - 25. No description.

Carlo Zaccagnini has argued that the design of the Babylonian map of the world may have lived on in the T and O map of the European Middle Ages.

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